The Poetry Life by Baron Wormser

Author:Baron Wormser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cavankerry Press

I felt so exhilarated that I was faint. I was in my student apartment with its posters of Janis Joplin and Bessie Smith that looked out onto a frowsy, winter backyard of dead grass, but I was first of all in my body. My body had been a matter of grave concern to my parents, a sad weight, particularly what in high school my girlfriends and I called the “delta” in our little homage to Anais Nin. “How’s the delta doing today?” we’d ask in the way guys would ask other guys how it was hanging. Why not, I kept thinking, exult in my body? What was wrong with being in a body? Were we Gnostics, people who despised the flesh? I knew from more than one Jewish wedding that my parents could whoop it up with the schnapps-drinking best of them. But there was a cloud hanging over us girls, the cloud of the delta.

Anne didn’t free me from guilt about my having a woman’s body. I did that on my own and I had men to thank for it. They wanted to use what I had and I wanted to use what they had. It was a utilitarian bargain, but it was ever much more than that. It was about appreciation. I liked being appreciated. I liked being Woman with that capital letter. We came in all sizes and shapes, but we all were Woman and Anne got that so right. That long passage of anaphora—to use a word I teach in the college—where she describes various women is, for me, one of the most beautiful affirmations of being a woman. It’s so like Anne to note that they “all / seem to be singing, although some can not / sing a note.” Anne didn’t make things out to be better than they were. She didn’t have to because she was so physically in touch with what actually was. She reveled in it and the metaphors she conceived (for that is the word) were endless ways of praising what is. Maybe since she experienced so much anguish she could praise the body without reservation. She wasn’t about to take it for granted. Everything was a gift that could be taken away. Or that she could take away in her grief.

Part of me wished that I could share Anne with my mother; I tried haltingly a few times, as in “Listen to this poem, Mom.” My mother would be polite; after all I was her daughter who was going to become a professor and then who became a professor. Education excused many shortcomings. But for my mother the poems might as well have come from Mars. “She’s not very polite,” my mother would say. “Does her mother know she talks like that?” “She may be a famous poet, but I wouldn’t want you to become famous doing that.” For every poem my mother had a sensibly prim comment. To her Anne seemed one more example of how hopelessly confused America was, how it insisted on making the private into the public.

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